New Release: Gamepro Issue 162 March 2002

[Melki]

Retromags Presents!

Gamepro Issue 162
March 2002

Database Entry!

Download Directly!

 

Scanned by Phillyman. Edited by Melki

Edited October 12, 2017 by Melki

[E-Day]

 This scan is missing some pages around page 76 or 78.

[Melki]

22 hours ago, E-Day said:

 This scan is missing some pages around page 76 or 78.

Hi @E-Day, i've rechecked the original files and theres no missing pages at least from the original source and the numbers match. i downloaded twice... can you verify with @Phillyman any missing voucher or something?

 

[E-Day]

Well, heck. You're right. I was looking at the files that weren't edited on Phillyman's NAS. I was going to edit them because they were still there so I thought they weren't done yet. In that folder, the pages jump from 78 to 83. But your release has all the pages. I retract my statement! Sorry.

 

[Melki]

10 hours ago, E-Day said:

Well, heck. You're right. I was looking at the files that weren't edited on Phillyman's NAS. I was going to edit them because they were still there so I thought they weren't done yet. In that folder, the pages jump from 78 to 83. But your release has all the pages. I retract my statement! Sorry.

 

oh ok, btw after editing ...should i move the folder to another "editing folder" or let some1 know about it?. . im just wating for more gamepro files to edit. uploading any gamepro scan will summon me...... @Phillyman @KiwiArcader 

[E-Day]

If you just change the folder name by adding " - edited by Melki", then I and others will know that it's been done. Then I can move it to the archived folder.

What I do when editing scans is I straighten and crop them, then save it before the colour correction gets done. That way we have the original full-sized files in case we ever need them again. I then put those cropped files in the archive folder.

The saving gets done as the first step of the colour correction action in Photoshop, so it's not more work for me :). I also save a final copy after that at full size (3240 pixels high), and the standard 2200 pixels high that we release. In case one day we decide to make scans bigger.

[kitsunebi]

6 hours ago, E-Day said:

What I do when editing scans is I straighten and crop them, then save it before the colour correction gets done. That way we have the original full-sized files in case we ever need them again. I then put those cropped files in the archive folder.

The saving gets done as the first step of the colour correction action in Photoshop, so it's not more work for me :). I also save a final copy after that at full size (3240 pixels high), and the standard 2200 pixels high that we release. In case one day we decide to make scans bigger.

Just make sure that you save everything other than your final, completely edited pic as a PNG if you're going to be saving the same file multiple times.  Saving a cropped image as a jpg and then saving it again as a jpg after color correction is subjecting the file to twice the amount of compression/image degredation.

[E-Day]

On 12/10/2017 at 5:30 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

Just make sure that you save everything other than your final, completely edited pic as a PNG if you're going to be saving the same file multiple times.  Saving a cropped image as a jpg and then saving it again as a jpg after color correction is subjecting the file to twice the amount of compression/image degredation.

Good point. Phillyman's scans are all jpgs. But I am saving it at it's original setting, so it shouldn't be adding more compression unless I reduce the quality settings, which I don't. When I resave the colour corrected copies as both Full size and 2200-pixel height, I have the quality set to 9, so it shouldn't be degrading the image. Logically, I should be able to resave 100 copies of the same image at the same setting without the quality changing.

I just ran an experiment with a photo I took in Italy last month. I saved the original as a copy 20 times with the same quality setting as the original (11), then saved it once with a quality setting of 9.

Original:

The 20th save:

The 21st save at image quality 9:

To my untrained eye on my mediocre work monitors, these all look the same to me, or at least close enough that I can't tell the difference. If you're using a high end monitor or high ppi screen, it may be a different story

[kitsunebi]

Yeah, the Scansnap that Philly and I use is great, but it isn't capable of saving in lossless formats, alas, so his files are going to be jpgs by necessity.  You're right of course that any artifacting created by saving a photo at the same compression level will be so minor as to be negligible (to be honest, the difference between saving a file at 12 and 9 is almost indiscernible).  But it's still recompressing a compressed image (which is why the exact number of bytes in the copied file will be close, but not identical).  So even if it isn't noticeable, I try to keep such things to an absolute minimum, if just on principle alone (although its mostly just a matter of me being anal about such things).

[E-Day]

I just checked the images from the test I ran this morning, and all the copies saved at quality 11 are the exact same size (4,218,880 bytes). And that's 12 bytes larger than the original.

[kitsunebi]

1 hour ago, E-Day said:

I just checked the images from the test I ran this morning, and all the copies saved at quality 11 are the exact same size (4,218,880 bytes). And that's 12 bytes larger than the original.

That...doesn't really make any sense.  Are you sure that you're making copies of the copies?  Obviously just opening the original file and saving 20 copies will result in 20 identical copies.  But if you save a copy, close the original, open the copy, save a copy of the copy, close the copy, open the second copy, save a copy of that, and so on, the filesizes should be slightly different.

I suppose it's possible that the version of Photoshop you're using doesn't bother compressing the file and just makes an identical copy if all you did was open the file and save it without making any changes.  So a better experiment might be to make a one-pixel dot somewhere on the file using the pencil tool, then save it using the method above.

I don't have the patience to do it 20 times, but I did it 10 times and the resulting images show definite signs of deterioration, though granted, it isn't obvious without zooming in.

Here's the original (which already has some artifacting, but that's irrelevant to the purpose of this experiment)

And here's the 10 generation copy.  Each dot was made before saving a copy, closing the file, and opening the new copy to make an additional dot.  The additional artifacting is particularly noticeable in the blue/sky area, and around the dots that were added.

 

The second (10th gen) file is only about 80 bytes larger than the original (probably due to the additional dots), but as you can see, being recompressed 10 times does have an effect, even if it is an insignificant one.

[E-Day]

I think it's how Photoshop handles files. I open the original, save a copy, make changes, and save another copy. I don't open the first copy and resave that with changes. So it seems like more recent versions of Photoshop don't make the copy you save the version you keep working on. I opened this file:

made a small white circle with the paint brush, did Save As and saved a copy, made another circles, rinse and repeat 12 times, and the quality stayed the same:

 

So with my method I'm not recompressing the image each time I do "Save As". When I do it your way with closing the copy and then opening it and resaving a new copy over and over, then it starts to get ugly. Thankfully I don't do that. I also tried something else, since with my method I do a straighten and crop and then Save before running the colour correction and saving the two copies. I wanted to see if doing a straight Save would make things worse, so I started with the original file, made a white circle, hit Ctrl+S to save it, made another white circle, Ctrl+S to save, and did that 21 times. No artifacting between the original and the final file which was resaved 21 times.

So unless you are closing and reopening JPGS to edit them repeatedly, Photoshop has taken the worry out of recompressing the files over and over.

[kitsunebi]

OK.  It seems we've been talking about different things.  Originally you had said something about saving a copy of the original file (after cropping/straightening) for the purposes of using at a later date should a re-edit be necessary.  That was what I was referring to when I warned that it would be best to save such a contingency file as a PNG, since that would involve closing the file and reopening the copy at a later time.

[E-Day]

I save the original file after straightening and cropping, so a ctrl+s, which won't degrade the image. Then I do the colour correction and save a cop at full size and then a copy at 200 pixels, neither of which degrade.

in a year if I have to open the original, maybe there will be a bit of degradation, but I challenge anone to be able to see it. If it's a concern for people, I can adjust my Action to save it as a PNG in a different folder or something. It's no extra work for me apart from that.

[kitsunebi]

2 minutes ago, E-Day said:

I save the original file after straightening and cropping, so a ctrl+s, which won't degrade the image. Then I do the colour correction and save a cop at full size and then a copy at 200 pixels, neither of which degrade.

in a year if I have to open the original, maybe there will be a bit of degradation, but I challenge anone to be able to see it. If it's a concern for people, I can adjust my Action to save it as a PNG in a different folder or something. It's no extra work for me apart from that.

Right, as I said, I was never trying to make the argument that saving a file multiple times during the same editing session was harmful in any way (which is where the misunderstanding originated.)  And you're right that making a single 2nd gen copy down the line would hardly make a noticeable difference.  As I said, I'm just anal about double compression (it stems back to the early days of MP3s when some jackass would make a 320kbps encode of a 128kbps file and think that they were improving it as opposed to making it worse. )